Shacsun

For the 2nd year in a row, there was not a single depredation on the large cattle ranch in the middle of our study area—we were not aware of even a single wolf that even stepped foot on the ranch last year! And last year was the 3rd year in a row where no wolves were killed on the ranch for killing calves. The 7.5 mile fence in combination with Livestock Guardian Dogs has effectively ended what was a perpetual cycle of death for over two decades: wolves would kill calves almost every year, and then wolves would get killed for killing calves. Each year was rinse, wash, and repeat. In some years, up to 5 calves were confirmed to have been killed by wolves (and likely more were killed by wolves that could not be confirmed), and up to 16 wolves were killed in a summer as a result (the equivalent of about 4 wolf packs in our area). So the change over the past few years has been  staggering, and illustrates how non-lethal approaches in the Great Lakes area can end long-standing conflicts, and in turn, benefit ranchers, their livestock, and wolves. Fortunately, our project is in a perfect position to document the efficacy of the non-lethal solutions on this ranch because we are intensively studying wolves all around the ranch and have GPS-data from wolves to examine the efficacy of these non-lethal approaches. If you value this kind of work, please donate at the link below. Your donations allow us to continue to study and document the efficacy of these non-lethal tools this year and into the future AND enables us to share our findings broadly here with everyone. Donate here: crowdfund.umn.edu/campaigns/VWP2… Notably, this non-lethal project was the result of a collaborative effort between our project, USDA Wildlife Services, and the rancher. And it was truly a team effort—without all of us helping in big ways, this project would never have happened. Further, the non-lethal project received considerable support from a variety of groups— including the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, International Wildlife Coexistence Network, Summerlee Foundation, Humane World for Animals, Wildlife Services, and others—who made this effort possible.

A Lulu update and a desperate plea below. @BaliAid are a tiny charity, funded entirely by your donations and continually struggling to be seen. I try but I need your help. Please give whatever you can, there is no amount too small, and repost as widely as possible. Thank you ❤️

Erin Brockovich has launched a website and has begun tracking all data centers in America and logging resident complaints In just 1 week it’s already logged 1,690 resident complaints For this who don’t remember Erin Brockovich was the paralegal responsible for winning out a case against PG&E, Hinckley in California, because their wastewater runoff was seeping into rural areas and creating a lot of health issues for, for the surrounding neighborhoods That case brought in a $333 million settlement that went to the families affected by the situation because a lot of them either had staggering medical bills due to their tap water was no longer safe So why is this important, well residents all over America are reporting their tap water and river water is being heavily polluted by data centers Her map of data centers is new, she just launched it The website features an interactive US map showing operational, under-construction, and proposed AI data centers, overlaid with community-reported complaints Residents can submit reports with details, photos, and locations. Within days of launch, it received a surge of submissions over 1,600 in the first week, and reports of 1,800+ from 47 states shortly after Common Resident Complaints Being Logged - Water usage - Raising utility bills for residents - Noise pollution: Constant 24/7 humming from fans, generators, and cooling systems disrupting sleep, daily life, and wildlife. - E-waste from frequent hardware upgrades, pollution including PFAS concerns

@tylerblack32 100% agree.

No nurse practitioner at any level should be prescribing an antipsychotic without psychiatric supervision. I'm barely ok with non-psychiatric doctors prescribing antipsychotics. I wouldn't touch a '-mab' prescription, please non-psych world keep your hands off of antipsychotics

ONLY A NUMBER, NEVER A NAME Consider the existence of factory farmed animals - cruelly caged and confined, hidden in vast sheds out of sight and mind Chickens with more space in the oven, rabbits that can’t even hop, sows that can’t turn around The greatest abuse of animals in the world happening on our watch!! What has happened to our humanity? #EndTheCageAge #EndFactoryFarming @CIWF_Global

The kind you buy .. In a second hand store

My dad — an arborist working for public works/the parks— cited his workplace exposures to chemicals as the likely cause of his ALS. Decades later, I learn several people at my dad’s (relatively small) workplace ended up with ALS. marinij.com/2014/07/26/for…

@giveashitnature I love learning about progress like this with people like Lou.

Lou Perrotti spent 25 years saving an endangered beetle most of us wouldn't recognize. He runs the American burying beetle recovery program out of a converted storage building behind Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. The beetle was federally endangered in 1989 after vanishing from 90% of its range. Perrotti rears them in his lab, ships them by hand to Nantucket every June, and has personally released thousands of beetles to rebuild the eastern population. The work paid off. In 2020 the beetle was downlisted from endangered to threatened. The same year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named Perrotti a Recovery Champion. Before this, he was a retail manager who did snake outreach at libraries on weekends. He got hired as a zookeeper, was handed the beetle assignment by USFWS in the early 1990s, and never stopped. He has a burying beetle tattoo on his arm. He's still doing the work. Most species recovery looks like this. One person. One species. One quiet career.

@GavinNewsom Totally believable. This is great. Fix the funding for California's K-12 public schools next.

You won’t hear this on Fox News: California just released a balanced budget that wipes out the deficit this year AND next — while protecting health care and safety nets. Meanwhile, Trump ADDED $2.4 TRILLION to the federal deficit with his “Big Beautiful Betrayal.” Republicans ruin budgets. Democrats balance them. Adulting matters.

More than 140 officers were injured defending the Capitol on January 6th. They waited six years for the plaque in their honor to be hung in the Capitol. They watched as Donald Trump pardoned every single one of their assailants. Some of them can no longer work and cannot even get disability benefits. But Donald Trump has set aside nearly $2 BILLION of your taxpayer money to pay the criminals who assaulted them. It’s a punch in the face to every police officer in this country who puts his or her life on the line to protect us. I support Officers Daniel Hodges and Harry Dunn in their lawsuit to stop this outrageous scheme.

Amazon is worth $2 trillion. But it didn't deign to pay the millions of dollars it racked up in unpaid fines as its’ trucks illegally polluted our air and forced New Yorkers to breathe in their exhaust.  
We collected every dollar they owe the people of this city — and will continue to hold them accountable. In New York, corporations are held to the same standard as everyone else.  
No company — no matter how large or powerful — is above the law.

Fun fact: North Carolina still hasn’t recovered from hurricane Helene, and Trump wants $2 billion to give people who smeared shit on the walls of the Capitol.

When Charles Darwin was having a rough day:

Toru Miyazaki gave 11 cats with advanced kidney disease an experimental injection. 15 others didn’t get it. A year later, 9 of the 11 treated cats were alive. Only 3 of the 15 untreated cats survived. He just filed for approval, and the drug fixes a defect only cats have. Most cats die from one thing: their kidneys fail. By age 10, 4 in 10 cats already have chronic kidney disease, and by age 15, the rate doubles to 8 in 10. Once diagnosed, a cat has about 2 years left. The reason kidney disease hits cats so hard is a broken protein in their blood. All mammals carry a protein that helps the kidneys clean out waste. In humans and dogs, the protein floats freely and goes to work when the kidneys are in trouble. In cats, it stays stuck to another protein and can’t get loose. So the waste piles up, and the kidneys eventually give out. Miyazaki originally found the protein in 1999, back when he was at the University of Tokyo. He figured out the cat-specific glitch in 2015. The paper he published in the Veterinary Journal in February laid out the trial. The injection is a working version of the missing protein. His company, the Institute for AIM Medicine, filed the approval paperwork with Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture on April 24, 2026. If the review clears, the drug goes on sale in spring 2027. The 30-year lifespan figure in the tweet is Miyazaki’s own projection of what cats could reach without kidney disease. The trial only ran a year, and the average cat today lives 15. Most die from the same disease this injection treats. The research almost died in 2020. After running out of funding during COVID, Miyazaki went public. Cat owners across Japan responded by sending in 300 million yen, around 2 million dollars total. He resigned from the University of Tokyo and worked on the drug full time. The treatment in front of regulators today exists because cat lovers refused to let the research die.

There’s always money available, just not for us

"How are you able to remove wolf pups from the den without getting attacked by their parents”? We get this question quite often as well as general questions about how we stay safe while studying wolves. E.g., we have been asked if we carry guns for our safety from wolves more times than we can count. So we figured we would share a bit about how we view staying safe from wolves in the field. The short answer: we are not exaggerating when we say have no concern whatsoever about wolves attacking us because wolves simply are not a threat to our safety because they really don’t want anything to do with us. And if anyone should get attacked by wolves or concerned about being attacked, it should be us given our work. Let us elaborate. We have visited active wolf dens and tagged pups every spring for over a decade. We often see or hear adult wolves at dens while doing this work. Yet, we have not had a single evenly remotely concerning or aggressive encounter with an adult wolf while doing this. If there was any time an adult wolf would have a motive for attacking and killing people, it would be when visiting a den and handling their pups. Think about what would happen if you grabbed a bear cub in front of its mom? On a similar vein, we spend much of our year studying wolf predation, hiking into recent kills by ourselves to document the kills. Sometimes, especially during winter, this means we get to kills while the carcass is very fresh, sometimes steaming and warm because it occurred an hour or two ago. In such instances, wolves are undoubtedly somewhere very close by and well aware of our presence. If disturbing a wolf’s kill is what triggers an attack—the kind of things we read about online and see portrayed on TV— then we definitely should have been attacked by now. Yet, we have never had a wolf so much as approach us when checking out their kills (and we have documented a few thousand kills in the past 12 years). Furthermore, we have had 6-8 people in the field most days of the year visiting areas GPS-collared wolves spend time. We know from our GPS-collar data that we are frequently close (25-200 m) to collared wolves when in the field. And we are typically spending most of our time in the very areas wolves like to spend time! If being in close proximity to wolves on a frequent basis is what increases the odds of getting attacked, then someone on our project should have been attacked by now. This is especially true because we do almost all of our fieldwork solo because it is most efficient. And yet, despite all of this and many years of intensive fieldwork, we have not had a single even remotely concerning encounter. This does not mean we have not had close encounters with wolves. We have had over a hundred at least. But a close encounter where the wolf does not immediately flee does not mean the wolf is being aggressive or showing a lack of fear. Sometimes wolves, like most other animals, are just curious or inquisitive. Instead of being afraid in such moments, we just savor such rare moments and take it in. Now, these are just our experiences but the data across North America only substantiates our assessment here. There are literally millions of people across North America who hike, camp, and live in wolf country and yet wolf attacks are almost unheard of. Sure, there have been a few EXTREMELY rare instances where wolves have threatened or attacked people but this is also true of white-tailed deer—in fact there are far more white-tailed deer attacks on people than wolves. Interestingly, though, no one we know regards deer as a threat to human safety (outside of vehicle collisions). NOTE: if you value this kind of educational content, please help us continue to create it by donating to our annual fundraiser at the link below. Your donations make this kind of content possible—without donor support, our project quite literally would not be able to continue. By donating you support our research and our outreach efforts! Donate here and support our work: crowdfund.umn.edu/campaigns/VWP2…

AOC: I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report. I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. The fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight. And I think that for young people, it was a huge part of the environment. I can tell you for myself as a candidate during that cycle, there’s no way that it was an ignorable issue or totally immaterial. So I think that it’s a real disservice to not speak to that or include or assess that.

When her partner passed away, this female stork couldn't feed herself while she incubated her eggs..🪺🥺🙏 Good Samaritans have begun to feed her..❤️

Erin Brockovich is back, and this time she's coming for the AI industry, calling out Big Tech's data center boom as the next great environmental shakedown of American communities. She launched a self-reporting map at brockovichdatacenter.com, and within a week over 1,600 residents had filed complaints spanning noise pollution, skyrocketing utility bills, and serious water depletion concerns. The pattern she's seeing looks awfully familiar: corporations dangle promises of jobs and tax revenue, municipalities wave projects through with minimal environmental review, and the people who actually live there get left holding the bag. The water issue alone should be setting off alarm bells. Data centers gulp enormous amounts of water to keep their cooling systems running, and some are being planted directly above critical aquifers. As Brockovich put it plainly, "Wasting heat is wasting water. We can't afford either." The technology to capture and reuse that waste heat already exists, it's just not being required. That's a policy failure, not a tech failure. A recent Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities, with many saying they'd rather live near a nuclear plant. Brockovich's demand is straightforward: if Big Tech is going to drain public water supplies and jack up utility bills, the public deserves full transparency. "If you're using public resources, the public has a right to know how much. Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

@coookwithchris Mixing cabbage w vinegar and/or mayo gets rid of the issue for me.

One of the most overlooked causes of gut issues: raw, cruciferous vegetables Here's why: Fiber: Although fiber can be beneficial, it can be difficult for people with gut issues to break down (especially in large amounts). Insoluble fiber especially, can lead to bloating and gas. Complex Sugars: Raw cruciferous vegetables contain raffinose, which are not easily broken down. Our bodies cannot produce the enzymes needed to break down these down. Glucosinolates: Cruciferous vegetables contain glucosinolates. Although these can have some health benefits, they can be hard to digest. When broken down, they can prevent the thyroid from absorbing iodine. Cellulose: The cell walls of cruciferous vegetables are made of cellulose, a type of fiber that humans struggle to digest. This is one of the reasons why cooking is so helpful for digestion; it breaks down some of the cellulose, requiring less work from your gut. Oxalates: Oxalic acid, or oxalates, is a compound in many plant foods. In large amounts, it can inhibit the absorption of some nutrients, like calcium. Cooking also gets rid of some of these oxalates. So, if you struggle with gut issues, always make sure to cook your vegetables well! If you have severe gut issues, it may be worth cutting them out temporarily. I’d recommend steaming them or sauteing them with some garlic and olive oil.